So, Dusty's school uses online books that apparently use a version of Adobe PDF that won't open on my iPad or iMacs. We tried leopard and lion.

Logged in to my work PC and the online book works.

So, rather than buy a PC, I figured I would either get a virtual software and run windows or bootcamp, but that means formatting the drive, right? Then I would have to fuss with reinstalling every thing again...

"If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hard-line, unreasonable, totalitarian mullahs in the world but not with Republicans? Maybe he’s not the problem."

With Crossover you buy only Crossover, install an XP emulating bottle, IE 7, and Adobe Reader. With any luck it will open the pdf files. It works with most. I have it running on mine, but it won't open some pdfs, don't know why.

With Boot Camp you have to reboot to Window and back, and Parallels is a Memory hog. Parallels alone needs 2G to run decent. If you can put 8 or 16G in the iMac it helps big time.

Crossover is not that big of a Memory hog, very small footprint.

I actually have to check this out for a customer. The school system has pdf files for teachers that are password protected and will not open properly on the Mac, either in the browser or if downloaded. They open but you can't navigate off of the opening page.

I'll let you know how it goes, I need to get the link and log in info from her today. May have to wait until after school.

Actually, I bet it's the same site or something because that's exactly what happened. I couldn't navigate off the Book Cover.

I downloaded it at work and emailed it to myself. Found out that it's password protected so I couldn't print it.

You will need Adobe Reader TM version 8.1.3 or later to view our online editions. Please note that some newer copyrights will require Flash Player 10 be installed for viewing of the online editions. If you do not have this software, please download it

Yours can unofficially take 6G of RAM if it's an iMac7,1 or 8,1, (System Profiler has that info) Apple says 4G. Crucial has two 2G chips for $50 shipped. If you wanted to go 6G you'd have to get two 4G chips, but the machine would only see 6 of it, and they are $90 each.

Crossover has a 30 day demo, and when you install XP, IE 7, and Acrobat Reader it installs Flash 10. I would try that first, and see how it runs on 2G of RAM before spending any money.

Crossover will have IE and XP as default options, but you'll need to download Acrobat Reader and install it as Other application.

You might want to try Acrobat Reader 9.4 first, according to the Crossover FAQs it is more compatible.

I see Win 7 Home Premium on Amazon for $92 shipped. Crossover is a little cheaper, but like you said you know that Boot Camp 7 would be fully compatible.

It's a lot more work to install Boot Camp initially, and as long as he doesn't use it for anything other than reading the PDFs he won't need AntiVirus software, but you can always get AVG Free if he plans to go to other web sites etc while booted into Windows.

The booting back and forth can be kind of a pain though if he wants to do more than just read the PDFs and surf the web, YMMV.

I guess I gotta bite the bullet and buy this as I have to have a copy of Windows no matter if I go bootcamp or VM.

You don't need one with CrossOver though, but Crossover is $65-70, only a bit cheaper than the real thing, it is less demanding on the system, but may not work with the PDFs, that's why I mentioned a demo.

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